Nature does not behold landscape. What we call landscape is the result of man's action on nature or at least the result of his look, filtered by culture and memory. The ancient world did not have a word for landscape. The term appeared at the beginning of the 16th Century as an adjective in the expression 'landscapist' (pittore paesaggista). Etymology has it derive from the corresponding Italian word, 'paese' – village, of the Latin 'pagus', following the French 'pays'/'paysage', literally "... an extension of a village – 'paese'". However, it is interesting to see also the stem of 'pagus', which refers to the verb 'pango', that is to say 'to fix, to plant, to establish (in the land)', the establishing of borders.
The border of human environment in the mountains has been the village and its extensions for centuries: the territory made use of for migration to mountain pastures or as pastureland for sheep and goats – space that was often bordered off by crosses that enclosed it and defended it from strangers who lived in inhospitable places in the vicinity of the mountain peaks. This is where the ancient pagan divinities had retired, by then languished and transformed into fiendish figures. These spaces were nameless in apposition to the plentiful toponyms of the areas concerning human activity and there were no footpaths over their territory. The shepherds rarely made their way through them. At the most, one could come across a daring hunter or a shepherd looking for stray animals.
This situation changed rapidly when World War I broke out and for the first time had hundreds of thousands of men spend three long years in inhospitable and inaccessible places, often in extreme environmental conditions. Trenches, defensive works, huts, shelters, roads and paths dotted the territory and when silence once again reigned the landscape had been greatly modified. Years go by and the natural conditions, year after year, contribute in blotting out those works of man, at times turning them into nothing but faint traces of the past. At present the territory is crossed over as if it were a set of archives in the open. Culturally orientated hiking nowadays allows for the reconstructing of the stories of the men and the detachments through remains.
The photographs of Giampietro Agostini amaze us because they refer to a completely different context. Their attempt is not to reproduce the landscape that the soldiers describe in their letters, diaries and memoirs, or the landscape teeming with men and animals during the construction of roads, footpaths, shelters, huts and trenches. Their looks and emotions, as well as their fears and their bliss, do not turn up here. It is but the landscape as we see it today, where the works of man have been swallowed up by nature: the roads are now footpaths, the rubble walls nothing else but stones, the huts in shambles. However, the work of time and nature has not been homogeneous and so, in the landscapes high up made up of meagre pastures and vertical deserts of stone, solitary crystal clear lakes and shambles, as far as the eye can see, we can view parts of flagged roads, stumps of walls and fragments of trenches.
Mr Agostini's eyes are those of a walker who knows nothing of the war that stained the mountains with blood. When, on turning round a bend along a footpath or after having crossed a mountain pass, these structures come into view unexpectedly, they look like ruins of a bygone civilization that emerge from a period we cannot make out.
Where the vastness of space has swallowed up the work of man, where traces have become fainter and fainter and can be distinguished only at a second glance, here is what seems to be the work lost in the landscape of an artist of art/nature. Reminding us of the presence of thousands of men in the mountains there is today a mere and fleeting sign on the land, as witnessed by Andy Goldsworthy or David Nash. It seems as if Mr Agostini would like to replace the landscape with the landscape for memory, to draw attention to nature rather than to the work of man or to the traces teeming with history. This is why his images give one the sensation of being on the border: a border which is not the belligerents' but the border in between memory and oblivion, history and nature, the intense period of the war years and the unascertained time of the mountains. Border landscapes which are borders of memory at the same time.